Oh, Canada

Canadians celebrate and here are some photos.

The Snowbirds fly past Parliament Hill:


Special ceremonies were held for the first time at the National War Memorial, to mark the Battle of Beaumont-Hamel , at the beginning of the Battle of the Somme -- 700 men in the 1st Newfoundland Regiment were killed or wounded in the first minutes of the offensive as it began on July 1, 1916:


Governor General Michaelle Jean:


Canadian farmers protest the usual government inaction:

And here is why Michaelle Jean is a great Governor General. Instead of trying to ignore the tractor protest, she welcomed the protestors to Parliament Hill and paid tribute to them in her speech:

As protesters lined tractors and farm machinery along the street in front of the Hill, Governor General Michaelle Jean took note of Canada's prosperity, including in her remarks a thank-you to the people who toil to provide the country with a safe and plentiful food supply. "Ours is a country of great wealth from its plains, forests and mountains that nourish us to the crystal clear waters of our abundant lakes and rivers," she said. "And I was reminded of our bountifulness just yesterday when I received a basket of wonderful fresh farm produce from the farmers of Canada, for which I am very grateful."

A gracious and unifying thing to say.

Great lines of the day

d r i f t g l a s s has a message for American conservatives. Canadian conservatives should also take a gander:

Remember?
Remember when it was all gonna be so cool once the Liberals were out of the way and you could liquidate the hated Federal Government. When the Government is the source of all evil in the Universe? When you could hang every problem in the world on welfare queens?
Remember the glory days of "We won. You lost. Now shut up."?
. . . You wanted this, and now it's yours. All yours.
History is watching you. The future is watching you. The massed billions yet unborn are watching you, and they see a pathetic huddle children who are throwing the world's most expensive tantrum because they don’t want to fix what they destroyed.
They see a no-neck ocean of cowards and fools and bigots, led by liars and crooks. They see you taking your hour in the sun -- the one you traded your ideals, your conscience and your soul to acquire – and pissing it away. Deliberately picking fights over trivia in the hopes that no one notices that you have destroyed a great nation,
They see you failing, in more ways and with worse consequences than any generation in American history. And doing it while giggling and jerking off to Ann Coulter.
Your children and grandchildren see all that you have done and all that you have failed to do and they are ashamed of you, so govern, you weak, stupid, frightened little men. You ARE the government, so quit bellowing and blaming everyone from Michael Moore to Cindy Sheehan for your sins.
Actually step up like men and govern and we’ll spend the next 20 years debating anything else you’d like. Flags and queers and all the rest of the fiddling nonsense.
Govern, or admit that you are uniquely incompetent to actually lead a great nation.
Govern…or shut the fuck up.

I couldn't really pick a single line to highlight. It's all worth reading.

Lumber "deal"

The Globe story is entitled Drive for softwood deal hits snag.
Well, one snag would be that there is no "deal", apparently.
The Globe calls is "a draft text of a final deal" and a "proposed final draft".
The BC Lumber Trade Council calls it "the current working draft" and says "more talks are needed to achieve a final agreement".
Ontario Natural Resources Minister David Ramsay seems to call it "a final draft", particularly when he found out that the whole whatever-it-is could be revoked in just two years.
And to Canadian ambassador Michael Wilson its not a deal or a draft at all, its just "a file", as in:

“This file has been really under intense work over the last few weeks, particularly the last few days. We're consulting with the provinces, with the industry,” Mr. Wilson said. “We want to get it resolved quickly. There's a lot of money at stake here that we want to return as quickly as we can to the producers. And it's very definitely a priority for the Prime Minister and the government,” . . . “I've watched this file evolve over the last three months and we've had our ups and downs on it. We think that a particular matter is resolved and someone comes up with a little glitch and we're back to the drawing board so I don't want to be precise. I can tell you that we're working very hard to get it resolved.”

And then, finally, we'll know just what to call it!

Last gift

Maybe I was feeling particularly dark-humoured this morning, but reading this started me laughing:

Dear Miss Manners: I was invited to a Celebration of Life for a friend who had passed a few months ago. What is the proper etiquette to attending a party like this? Do we bring a gift?
Congratulations on finding the only social event left that the guest of honor has not turned into a free shopping bonanza for himself.
If you can't handle that, you could send flowers. But as the nomenclature for the event de-emphasizes death, funeral flowers may seem out of place. It is also late to send flowers and food to the bereaved, as is customary in the first weeks of mourning, and Miss Manners trusts that you have long since sent your letter of condolence.
So just go and celebrate. If Miss Manners was mistaken and your friend left a list of places he registered for the event, you may ignore it. He'll never know.

"Iraq is not Viet Nam. It's drier and hotter"

Dave over at the Beaver has produced a chilling post about a painful topic: the rape of women by occupying soldiers. The specific reference is today's report on the accusation that five US soldiers raped an Iraqi woman and then killed her family.
Dave notes that the frequency of rape during the Vietnam war was also unreported, due to the myth that rape is the result of sexual desire. Dave describes the real dynamics:

. . . when soldiers start raping the female civilian population of a militarily occupied but politically unstable country it demonstrates a callous disregard for the indiginous population. Far from being there to help them and win them over, the occupied population has been reduced, in the minds of the occupiers, to sub-human, powerless and subject to intimidation.
In a situation where the "enemy" is no longer a clearly defined, uniformed combatant and has the ability to hide amongst the general population, the entire population becomes the enemy . . . This latest case in Beiji, Iraq, if the allegations are true, is a symptom of a greater condition. It is a sign that Iraq is lost . . . Gook? Hadji? What's the difference? The level of indifference to their survival is the same.

Curiouser and curiouser

Ah ha!
So this is how the Conservatives expected to get around the political contribution limits in their own Accountability Act -- they would just declare that their party wasn't making a profit, and keep on pulling the dollars in.
The more Harper insists he is right about the convention registration fee issue, the more it appears that this wasn't an accidental error:

The Conservative party's legal counsel, Paul Lepsoe, said that since "time immemorial" delegate fees have only been considered donations when a convention turns a profit. "If there is a portion that is a contribution, in other words that exceeds the cost of the event, that portion constitutes a political contribution for which a receipt should be issued," he told The Canadian Press earlier this week. "That's longstanding practice that everyone follows, including the Conservative party."

Well, first of all, he is just wrong. As CP points out:

it wasn't a longstanding practice for the NDP, Liberals or the predecessors of the Conservative party . . . the common practice they followed was to disclose convention fees paid by their members as political donations. "I'm absolutely positive we always gave out political receipts, minus the amount paid for meals, but everything else was always treated as a political donation," said Bruck Easton, former president of the Progressive Conservative party who later ran unsuccessfully as a Liberal. "That was quite frankly an important part of getting people to our convention."

And second, profitability has nothing to do with it -- or, at least, it never did before:

. . . the Conservative argument that they didn't need to disclose the fees because the convention didn't make a profit doesn't hold water. "If you carried that logic forward, you could argue that if you made a contribution to a political party and the party was in the hole for the year in question, it wouldn't necessarily need to report all the donations that were the difference from being in the hole and not in the hole," said Seidle. "The important thing is there is money in, and a service out . . . it's a kind of income and expense issue."

The ineptitude of the hastily-written, partisan-based Accountability Actis also coming into focus:

. . . University of Windsor Professor Heather MacIvor said she was stunned to hear the party's explanation on failing to disclose the fees. MacIvor recently wrote a critique of the government's new financing laws, part of its much vaunted Federal Accountability Act.
'Wait a minute folks, you're trying to say you're cleaning up politics and you brought in this seriously draconian tightening of the contribution rules, and now we find out you didn't disclose a few million dollars of contributions, which every other political party in this country has treated as a contribution for the purpose of the contribution rules?' MacIvor said. 'That's not on.'

Well, darn it -- so much for that plan, eh?

Baseball

This is why I love baseball.
The Indians were up 7-0 after seven innings, yet the Reds came back and won the game with a bottom-of-the-9th grand slam.

"That was a game we probably shouldn't have won," Dunn acknowledged. "We had no business winning that game, but everybody just kept grinding and grinding."

Is there any other sport that can turn around like baseball can?

The American Way

Glenn Greenwald is being sarcastic in this description:

The American way is to place blind faith in our political officials and let them operate in complete secrecy, especially when it comes to spying on American citizens on U.S. soil. Anyone who disagrees must want to help Al Qaeda commit terrorist acts against Americans. What other reason would anyone object?

Unfortunately, for millions and millions of Americans, this now describes their simple truth.
It is so sad to see this happening. America used to be a nation that was proud of its moral, legal and constitutional standards, a "shining city on the hill" whose people led the world in their respect for law, truth and justice, and who had an independent spirit which scorned obesiance to authority.
America was never totally consistent, of course -- they never totally achieved their ideal, but what nation ever does? In their hearts, Americans always thought of themselves as some combination of Cool Hand Luke, Tom Joad, Harry Callahan, Rooster Cogburn, Rocky Balboa.
Now they have Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld telling them all the time to be afraid, be very afraid. And millions of Americans believe them. Today we see the craven Wall Street Journal following orders to join the pile-on of the New York Times for publishing the story about government searching of bank acounts:

Would the Journal have published the story had we discovered it as the Times did, and had the Administration asked us not to? Speaking for the editorial columns, our answer is probably not . . . The obligation of the press is to take the government seriously when it makes a request not to publish. Is the motive mainly political? How important are the national security concerns? And how do those concerns balance against the public's right to know? The problem with the Times is that millions of Americans no longer believe that its editors would make those calculations in anything close to good faith. We certainly don't . . .

Interesting, isn't it, to see how the good Germans talked themselves into believing their government was right and their constitution was wrong.

Great line of the day

Did you see Al Gore on the Daily Show? Wasn't he terrific?
This is from his new interview in Rolling Stone:

Right now we are borrowing huge amounts of money from China to buy huge amounts of oil from the most unstable region of the world, and to bring it here and burn it in ways that destroy the habitability of the planet. That is nuts! We have to change every aspect of that.

The law is the law

Swish! Nothing but net! Slam dunk.
Finally, the US Supreme Court has said the law is the law. An expensive decision - the Guantanamo inmates have paid for this decision with four years of their lives:

. . . a provision of the Geneva Conventions known as Common Article 3 applies to the Guantánamo detainees and is enforceable in federal court for their protection. The provision requires humane treatment of captured combatants and prohibits trials except by "a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized people." The opinion made it clear that while this provision does not necessarily require the full range of protections of a civilian court or a military court-martial, it does require observance of protections for defendants that are missing from the rules the administration has issued for military commissions. The flaws the court cited were the failure to guarantee the defendant the right to attend the trial and the prosecution's ability under the rules to introduce hearsay evidence, unsworn testimony, and evidence obtained through coercion . . .
in finding that the federal courts still have jurisdiction to hear cases filed before this year by detainees at Guantánamo Bay, the justices put back on track for decision a dozen cases in the lower courts here that challenge basic rules and procedures governing life for the hundreds of people confined at the United States naval base there . . .
In ruling that the Congressional "authorization for the use of military force," passed in the days immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, cannot be interpreted to legitimize the military commissions, the ruling poses a direct challenge to the administration's legal justification for its secret wiretapping program . . .
in ruling that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions applies to the Guantánamo detainees, the court rejected the administration's view that the article does not cover followers of Al Qaeda. The decision potentially opened the door to challenges, by those held by the United States anywhere in the world, to treatment that could be regarded under the provision as inhumane.
Justice Stevens said that because the charge against Mr. Hamdan, conspiracy, was not a violation of the law of war, it could not be the basis for a trial before a military panel.

Yes, I should think that charging someone in a military court with an offense that is not a military crime should be thrown out.

A Nelson Moment

Ha ha!

The Conservative party may have illegally accepted millions in unreported donations last year because it didn't understand political financing laws

Great line of the day

From Wolcott: Rush Corks His Bat

Put your money where your mouth is

OK, admittedly not everyone who supports the Iraq War is in a position to sign up and go fight it -- they may have other priorities, or babies, or maybe they can't afford the loss in pay, or something equally valid.
But do they have money? If so, here's a great idea.
In response to this AP article "Safer Iraq said needed for US investment", Juan Cole has a suggestion for all those right-wingnuts who say things are going better in Iraq than the media coverage shows:

I think we ought to hold their feet to the fire. Every time someone says that in reality things are just fine in Iraq, we should ask them how much of their own, personal money they have invested in a private business enterprise in Iraq. The Iraqi-American Chamber of Commerce can help them with specific investment opportunities.
I think we should exclude buying real estate or investing in mercen . . . I mean US contracting. Also, it has to be an investment in Arab Iraq, not the Kurdistan Regional confederacy. But, if things are going so great, then surely this is the time to put $100,000 into, say, a textile factory in . . . I don't know, Baquba. Most of these politicians and bloggers on the Right could afford such an investment, and most wouldn't even be too badly off if they lost the whole wad.
So, Fox Cable News anchors, rightwing bloggers, smug pundits, etc., etc.-- Pony up. How much have you put on the line here to back up your Dr. Pangloss-style rose colored glasses? And, if you haven't put at least a few tens of thousands of dollars into a private Iraqi business, then you do not have a leg to stand on.

Do US politicians have to declare their investments? If so, it should be easy to find our whether the Republican politicians who say they support the war and the indefinite American occupation of Iraq are now buying shares on the Iraq stock exchange and investing in Iraq businesses and companies.

Oops, forgot to post this earlier

If thisis true -- "A study found that in a disturbing number of cases, embarrassing 'senior moments' such as forgetting a recent conversation or drawing a blank on someone's name may really be a sign of Alzheimer's after all" -- then I've had Alzheimers all my life.
And I'm sure some of my readers would agree...

Great photo of the day

^^^Blogging used to be exactly like this, but better.^^^

The Poorman picks the perfect illustration for his post about blogofascism. That's exactly what those blasted blogofascists look like, too -- except for the ones that look like kittens. . .